More fic prompting from my head, century logistics & Historical/NegativeSpace NonAU
"In the last hundred years or so," his voice was teasing, "I never imagined anything like this.
I didn't believe I would ever find someone I wanted to be with...in another way than my
brothers and sisters. And then to find, even though it's all new to me, that I'm good
at it… at being with you…"
~*~
2005;
Lessons exquisitely crafted, Painstakingly drafted
He watches her sleep, paying attention to keeping her warm enough, to the tangle of her hair on her pillow, and the way her eye lashes flutter. The hours bring all his words back to him. They replay like lines in a play he's read a hundred times. The words that he knows, and the ones that are so well known by time they've lost sound and shape entirely.
There are admissions he wishes he could make, things that have never fallen from his lips in decades. Words she has no warning or preparation for, no frame of reference. That don't invalidate his statements, so much as sit by them. He knows what love is, and he can claim to having been loved and being loved, to having loved and to loving, but not in the way she would assume he meant if he said it.
His traces the apple of her cheek with a finger tip, slipping across her cheek bone, the shell of her ear, and then down along her jaw, stopping only when she frets and mumbles something about cold. Holding still even when she chooses to rub her face against his chest rather than her blanket. And in that act of unconscious faith and comfort, she can silence his fears, his past.
That he has been offered this precious impossible gift, when all he has known of love was that which left him, when all six of them retreated to their special, singular worlds, alone and adrift. Elusively, swiftly, pulled into and pushed away, aware with beyond all intimate borders of what he was offered, what he had, and what was forbidden to him -- until now.